Start the Flywheel

One of the funnest parts of my job as an engineering manager is when someone on the team reaches out and asks, "do you want to see something cool?" This always means that they've come up with a cool solution to a difficult problem or innovated in some unplanned way. While this is really exciting, it's important to exercise some caution at the same time, too. Let me explain.

When something is really innovative, the temptation is to immediately start asking questions like, "Can it do this?", "Will it fix that?" Usually, that means that people are really excited about the implications of what they're seeing. This is where the caution comes in - take the time to pause and express, in a sincere way, how cool what you're looking at is and how much you appreciate the initiative of the engineer that's showing it to you.

Experienced software engineers usually understand this dynamic but younger ones need need some mentoring to understand what's going on. It's critical to explain to them that when other people start peppering them with questions, it's due to the fact that they've already jumped to "what's next" after skipping, "hey this is cool!". In fact, the number of "what's next" kind of questions is directly proportional to how excited they are about what they're seeing.

By taking some time to praise people, you're giving the innovation flywheel some extra momentum. Innovation creates more innovation, so making sure you encourage this in your team is critical.